Use of javascript in Microsoft.
Microsoft needs to work closely with JavaScript to built its Edge web browser. All browsers need to process and execute JavaScript efficiently, so Microsoft has developed and maintains its own JavaScript engine for Edge. Actually, there has been talked of them creating an alternate version of NodeJS with the Edge engine. Microsoft has really embraced NodeJS. They thoroughly support Node on the Azure cloud platform. It's one of Azure’s major features, and they’ve integrated Visual Studio support for Node. Microsoft has also developed a version of Node for Internet Of Things(IoT) applications. NodeJS is great for IoT because it’s lightweight and efficient.
Microsoft is investing heavily in Node.js and JavaScript, which are first-class citizens on and across many other products. I’m at JSConf EU this weekend and caught up with John Papa, one of Microsoft’s JavaScript experts and a major open-source contributor to the language. He gave us the scoop on JavaScript’s popularity, why npm is essential to the Node.js ecosystem, and what led him to fall in love with JavaScript (all over again) in 2011.
There’s a couple of things that come to mind. First, I believe that JavaScript made development a lot more accessible to a lot of people. There are a lot of development stacks out there — .NET, Java, Go, so on and so on. They are all great — I’ve done a lot of .NET myself — but what I like about the JavaScript ecosystem, including Node.js, is how easy it is to get started and how the community is very engaged. People in the JavaScript community are really willing to reach out, share new ideas — it’s a very welcoming community, probably the most welcoming community I’ve been involved in. The JavaScript community was one of the first ones to engage in the open, embracing the internet for all the social conversations via Twitter, Gitter, on GitHub, Slack channels, and all these wide-open places to communicate. I think as the internet evolved, JavaScript devs seemed to be willing to step out of their comfort zones and go start programming across the internet.
The second piece, which is what specifically makes Node.js so awesome, is that with Node.js you basically add on what you want. When you create, for example, an Express web server using Node.js, you just add on what you want to do. As opposed to the traditional techniques of the last 20 years, which have been “let me give you a web server that does everything for you.” With Node.js, you just add on what you want using middleware with Express. And this makes it super attractive to all the popular JavaScript frameworks like React, Ember, Angular, Aurelia, and other ones that are out there these days.
